Frommer's Review
This museum offers a look at what it was like to live in an 18th-century palace. It has been restored to its former splendor and expanded to include four rooms long closed to the public. It's partly leased to tenants (on the upper levels), and there are shops on the street level -- but you'll overlook all this after entering the grand apartments of the Doria Pamphilj family, which traces its lineage to before the great 15th-century Genoese admiral Andrea Doria. The apartments surround the central court and gallery. The ballroom, drawing rooms, dining rooms, and family chapel are full of gilded furniture, crystal chandeliers, Renaissance tapestries, and family portraits. The Green Room is especially rich, with a 15th-century Tournay tapestry, paintings by Memling and Filippo Lippi, and a seminude portrait of Andrea Doria by Sebastiano del Piombo. The Andrea Doria Room, dedicated to the admiral and to the ship of the same name, contains a glass case with mementos of the great 1950s maritime disaster.
Skirting the central court is a picture gallery with a memorable collection of frescoes, paintings, and sculpture. Most important are the portrait of Innocent X, by Velázquez; Salome, by Titian; works by Rubens and Caravaggio; the Bay of Naples, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder; and a copy of Raphael's portrait of Principessa Giovanna d'Aragona de Colonna (who looks remarkably like Leonardo's Mona Lisa). Most of the sculpture came from the Doria country estates: marble busts of Roman emperors, bucolic nymphs, and satyrs.
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